Does the Rising Sun Affright

It encourages and requires us to think about connections with non-human and extra-human entities: from metal deposits and radiation, to yeast, clams or air. It does not privilege the human. It does not allow itself to be romanticised or fetishised, subjugated or objectified. Dark ecology – a concept developed by Timothy Morton – emphasises the mystery and complexity of ecological problems that are often beyond the reach of our (human) consciousness. It is a philosophical tool that allows us to look at the relationship between ourselves and the world – which is undergoing ever greater, faster and more difficult to understand changes. It allows one to find oneself in the dark – in a spectrum of strange and incomprehensible transformations manifested in events of various scales: from the entire planet to individual human bodies.

In the category of the spectrum, this time generational, we should also place the artists invited to co-create the exhibition, whose biographies and memories are set in a moment of transition. On the one hand, they go back to the end of the "long twentieth century" (to quote the sociologist Giovanni Arrighi) – the time of the expansion of global capitalism and the extractivism of the planet, its deposits or biosphere, on the other – to the ecological consciousness belonging to the twenty-first century and the narration of "planetary care" or the notion, formulated by the researcher Ewa Bińczyk, of "care for post-nature", often accompanied by the feeling of helplessness of an individual deprived of sufficient causative power.

Individual reactions to the aforementioned turn are revealed in creative practices – ways of working and choice of materials (post-industrial waste and everyday objects), in references to organic motifs, in collaboration with non-human, technological and organic subjects, in the operation of categories of strangeness, mutation, adaptation, introduction of ironic or erotic motifs. This involves attempts to develop emancipatory strategies or to formulate a stance towards crisis and apathy. Artistic reflection is not limited to the field of reflection on (dark) ecology. It goes beyond the accepted starting point, aiming at the reformulations of normative notions and categories – identity, politics, time, matter, future, human, life – that are necessary at the moment of breakthrough.

The exhibition's title is insidious and, like entities in Morton's philosophy, conceals its intent and meaningful breadth. The phrase borrowed from a poem by William Blake, translated by Zygmunt Kubiak, carries senses of a transition between night and day, darkness and light, and a future filled with tentative hope.

Artists: Ania Bąk, Claude Eigan, Natasza Gerlach, Veronika Hapchenko, Bianca Hlywa, Tiziana Krüger, Inside Job (Ula Lucińska, Michał Knychaus), Cezary Poniatowski, Aleksandra Słyż, Leilei Wu